Hello! It's been about a month since the last Carnival of Mathematics, and therefore high time we did another. We've done 117 before, which means (a) that this is number 118, and (b) that there are only another infinity to go before we have to think of a new numbering system for them.

Tradition dictates we open with some interesting fact about the number 118, preferably a fact that does not involve directory enquiry services. Wikipedia offers the rather pleasing fact that:

14 + 50 + 54 = 118 and 14 × 50 × 54 = 37800

15 + 40 + 63 = 118 and 15 × 40 × 63 = 37800

18 + 30 + 70 = 118 and 18 × 30 × 70 = 37800

21 + 25 + 72 = 118 and 21 × 25 × 72 = 37800

It says "there are no smaller integers that can be expressed as the sum of three integers such that each set of three has the same product" but that doesn't quite make any sense. Let's just enjoy the nice maths above and hope we've figured out what it all means before Carnival 37800 rolls around in March 5155.

Fortunately, I've been sent many better written and broadly coherent mathematical blog posts in the last month, so here is an unordered subset of them, including not-strictly-fewer-than two non-Euclidean songs.

I want to play with Game of Life

You can use it to build computers. If you are wondering whether Game of Life can therefore answer all mathematical problems, then you should read Haggis the Sheep's blog, which uses The Imitation Game as a starting point for discussing maths Alan Turing worked on.

John Cook has (for some reason) been counting primitive bit strings which gets very mathsy very fast — if anyone has a link to a blog post about how on Earth the Möbius function manages this neat trick then I'll add it in here.